Total Authority Podcast: Be the Brand that AI Recommends

ChatGPT is sending home buyers to Ben Kruse, and he says most of his recent leads are coming from AI platforms. The New Jersey realtor behind Choose Kruse explains how community pages, a tight geographic focus, and updated local content helped build a web presence that now brings inquiries beyond Google. Ben also shares why AI referrals seem warmer and more willing to respond. We discuss the conte...

Claude now works inside Google Docs, Sheets and Slides — and that's only the first of 6 AI search stories this week. Chris Panteli and Nick Biggs break down what each one means for your business: ▶ Claude moves into Google Workspace — your connectors and skills come with it ▶ Google AI Mode monitoring is now live for everyone — what your customers will set it to watch ▶ Grok Bot becomes a model ro...

Meta just launched Muse — a personal AI agent that doesn't stop at recommending a product. It researches, asks for your approval, and then buys it. Stripe has wired its Link wallet into it, Shopify has made Meta an AI channel in every store's admin, and Amazon is already shutting the door. Nick Biggs and Chris Panteli break down what that means for anyone who sells online or runs a local service b...

ChatGPT ads just got Sponsored Agents — click an ad and a business’s own AI agent takes over the conversation. Chris Panteli and Nick Biggs break down what that means for your business, plus 4 more AI visibility stories from this week: • ChatGPT’s Sponsored Agents — ads that answer questions for you (and why Nick Biggs expects them to be informational, not pushy) • Google Business Profile’s new “C...

Grok Bot is xAI's new "AI teammate" — every bot gets its own computer, signs into your tools and just does the job. Nick set up a roster of Star Wars-named bots, and this week one of them took a voice note from Chris, cancelled the day's runs and rewrote its own rules without a human touching Slack. Then it was a big week for models: GPT-6 Astra (who's actually got it, and how to test a new model...

Reddit lost its crown as the most-cited source in ChatGPT — and the new king is your own website. Brand-owned sites went from roughly 12% to 46% of ChatGPT's shopping-answer destinations in a year. In this week's Total Authority Podcast, Chris Panteli and Nick Biggs go through the four stories that change how you get recommended by AI: 1. Brand websites are now ChatGPT's central source (Stackline)...

We asked an AI assistant to recommend a lawyer 375 times across America's biggest cities — and in 3 out of every 4 answers, it never opened a single law firm's website. Here's what it read instead, and the 4 plays that get you in front of it. Inside this video: • Why "build a great website" quietly stopped working the moment AI started answering • The 5 kinds of page AI actually reads when it reco...

Zillow is the biggest real-estate site in America — and when AI is asked to recommend an agent, Zillow shows up in about 1 of every 40 sources it reads. If your AI visibility strategy is “be on Zillow,” AI is not seeing you. Here are the 4 plays that fix it. Total Authority asked AI to recommend an agent in 50 US cities (750 controlled tests) and logged every source it cited.  Realtor.com ’s agent...

We asked ChatGPT to recommend a real estate agent in the largest city of all 50 states — 2,826 recommendations naming 1,952 different agents. Houston got 234 names. Charleston, West Virginia got nine. And the metric that best predicted who gets recommended isn’t Domain Rating. In this video: why ChatGPT refuses the question entirely without web search (0 for 75), the ten websites that control 37%...

We analysed nearly 4,000 pages across 117 California MedSpas and scored more than 300 machine-readability signals against citations across seven AI platforms. The surprise? Clinics that were never cited by AI were still highly crawlable. Technical accessibility alone isn’t what separates the winners from the invisible. The bigger opportunities are provider transparency, deeper treatment content, f...

We studied 117 California med spas to test whether earned media actually affects AI visibility — and the gap was huge. Every clinic with five or more earned media placements was cited by at least one AI platform, while clinics with 5–14 placements recorded a median of 80 AI citations versus just 2 for clinics with zero placements. We break down the methodology, the 0.58 correlation, the outliers,...

We tested ChatGPT ads for one week to see whether the platform is genuinely worth your budget. We break down the painful approval process, limited targeting, campaign setup, conversion tracking and how ChatGPT ads compare with Google and Meta. After spending £75, generating 36 clicks and paying roughly £2.07 per click, the biggest question remains: are sales calls the wrong conversion goal? We rev...

Claude Code just ran a complete SEO, GEO and AEO audit—with one free skill. In this video, we test it on a real MedSpa website, break down its scores and expose the factors that could determine whether AI search engines trust, cite or completely ignore your business. You’ll see why factual consistency, expert credentials, transparent pricing, third-party citations and crawl access matter more than...

We analysed more than 1,000 bottom-of-funnel ChatGPT prompts across six medical clinic industries and five cities. The results revealed which sources actually influence AI recommendations—and why Instagram, Yelp and paid ads contributed almost nothing. You’ll discover the directories, certification boards and trusted platforms that matter in each medical niche, plus why your own website generated...

Most WordPress sites are slow, bloated, outdated, and not ready for AI search. In this video, I show how I rebuilt an old WordPress site into a fast, clean, SEO-ready modern website using Claude Code, GitHub, Next.js, Vercel, and a simple deployment workflow. After wasting nearly $5,000 and waiting over a year on a failed Webflow rebuild, this is the stack I wish I had used sooner. If your site is...

We used Claude Code to build an AI visibility system that shows why businesses win or lose inside ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and other AI search engines. In this walkthrough, we test a New York med spa against competitors using five modules: an AI Visibility Wargame, LLM Mirror, Hidden Prompt Hunter, Citation Asset Forge, and Authority Attack Plan. The big takeaway: AI doesn’t just care about ke...

A Google manual action should hurt Google visibility. But this case study showed something much stranger: the same drop appeared inside ChatGPT performance. In this video, we break down why Google indexation may act as an upstream discoverability signal for AI search, why fewer indexed pages can shrink your AI footprint, and what this means for brands relying on organic traffic. The key takeaway i...

Google penalties may not just hurt your rankings — they could crush your visibility inside ChatGPT and other AI tools too. In this episode, we break down Bing AI performance data, Google manual actions, ChatGPT visibility drops, and what this means for brands relying on search traffic. We also run real service pages through an AI authority grader to show why some businesses get recommended while o...

A powerful new AI model appeared, changed what was possible in days, then got abruptly taken down. In this episode, we break down the chaos around Mythos/Fable 5, what we built with it, why AI traffic is converting harder than traditional search, and why LLMS.txt might not matter nearly as much as people think. The bigger shift is clear: AI visibility is no longer a theory. Brands that build trust...

Can ChatGPT actually tell which hair transplant clinics are trustworthy? This video breaks down how AI systems assess clinic credibility, from named surgeons and public credentials to aftercare, pricing, case studies, and dangerous marketing claims like “unlimited grafts.” For clinics, this is no longer just a website issue. If your surgeons, processes, credentials, outcomes, and patient safeguard...

Hair transplant clinics are being judged differently now. This video breaks down why surgeon pages matter, what AI looks for when deciding who to trust, and why vague team pages, package-heavy marketing, and unsupported success claims can damage visibility. We compare strong clinic examples with weaker ones and show exactly what belongs on a high-trust surgeon page: credentials, board certificatio...

Claude Fabel 5 just dropped — and the jump looks ridiculous. In this video, we break down why the benchmarks are shocking, what makes this model different, and how it could change coding, automation, onboarding, lead generation, and internal business systems. This matters because AI is moving from “helpful assistant” to “business infrastructure.” If your competitors are using models like this to b...

Search is changing fast. In this video, we break down three major shifts professional service firms need to watch: Google pushing users deeper into AI Mode, OpenAI’s rumored super app changing how people search, and the rise of easy-to-build AI agents for business workflows. We also look at why ChatGPT ads could become a serious opportunity for early movers, especially as AI search starts matching...

AI search is starting to reshape how local businesses get discovered — and Dr. Josh Funk is already building for it. In this episode, Josh breaks down how Rehab to Perform scaled across 15 locations using a repeatable growth system covering SEO, AI visibility, content, outreach, ads, events, and founder-led authority. We unpack why GEO matters before it drives huge traffic, how to turn internal ex...

Are you wasting time on AI visibility tactics that sound smart but do nothing? In this video, we break down 12 myths keeping brands invisible across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Reddit, reviews, and search. From “AI SEO is just SEO” to “ranking #1 guarantees AI mentions,” we unpack what actually matters now: brand signals, earned media, reviews, community sentiment, structured data, a...